Cricinfo has been publishing the dream teams for each country one-by-one. Since India is yet to make an appearance, I thought why not I give a shot to the all-time-XI of Indian Cricket Team.

Openers:
There is no doubt who the two openers would be – Sunil Gavaskar & Virender Sehwag. I am willing to stake my life, that nobody can replace these two.

Middle Order:
Number 4 position is secure – no one can budge SRT from it.
To claim stake to the remaining two positions, I can immediately think of many players – Vijay Merchant, Vijay Hazare, Gundappa Viswanath, Pataudi, Dilip Vengsarkar, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman.
At the end of the day my choice would be Vengsarkar for #3, and Dravid for #5.

Allrounder:
I know Kapil Dev is the best allrounder India has ever produced, but I would keep him as a bowler in the team, and would take in Vinoo Mankad as the batting allrounder.

Wicket Keeper:
Farokh Engineer or Kiran More or Kirmani or Dhoni? Now this is a tough one – the best batsman among these is without a doubt Dhoni, but the best wicketkeeper would be either Engineer or Kirmani. I would choose Kirmani over Engineer as he had to keep to one of the best bowlers of India – Kapil Dev, after keeping to the spin-quartet flawlessly for many years.

Bowlers:
In all Cricinfo articles they have chosen three fast bowlers, and one spinner. I would instead go for the best four bowlers that India produced. Two players are automatically chosen – Kapil Dev and Anil Kumble.

For the other two bowlers I don’t see any clear contenders. If I look at the post-90 era, only two people stand out – Javagal Srinath and Bhajji. The spin-quartet from 70s – Bedi, Prasanna, Chandrasekhar and Venkataraghavan. And India’s fast bowlers from their opening test – Amar Singh and Mohammed Nissar who earned very high praise from English batsmen even 30+ years after having played them.

I would go with B Chandrasekhar as the second spinner (he was the best of the lot), and Amar Singh (the best fast bowler India had before Kapil) as the opening partner for Kapil Dev.

I have been reading Harsha Bhogle’s book Out of the Box over the last two days, and I am captivated. It is a collection of articles written by Harsha Bhogle over the last 5-6 years and it is such a delight to read them now with the added advantage of hindsight.

In the bookstore I also found the book that was released to celebrate Gavaskar’s 60th birthday – a collection of 60 articles by Sunil Gavaskar – Straight Drive. I read 2-3 pages of each before deciding to buy Bhogle’s book. The collection of Gavaskar’s articles are also very good, but just cannot be compared to the writing style of Harsha Bhogle. It is like reading match reports in Cricinfo and Times of India – ToI will tell you X batted well, Y bowled well, and Team-Z won; whereas Cricinfo will tell you all those things in such a way that you feel sorely sorry for missing the match, and make a promise to yourself not to miss the live telecast of the match next time India is playing.

Back to Harsha Bhogle’s book, it is really hard to keep it down. Each article is just 2-3 pages only, and has a footnote about whatever incident/match is mentioned in the article. I am opening the book at random, and reading whatever article I land on, and till now (I’ve read about 50% of the book till now), there has not been an article that I skipped over.

Out of the Box is a must buy for anyone who loves to read about cricket and all cricket lovers 🙂